


Just You and Me Within These Walls

by ladyeternal



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: 6000 Years of Pining (Good Omens), 6000 Years of Slow Burn (Good Omens), Accidental Bonding, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angel/Demon Relationship, Crowley Was Raphael Before He Fell (Good Omens), Episode: s01e03 Hard Times, Grace Bond, Hopeful Ending, Idiots in Love, Love Confessions, M/M, Scene: The Bandstand (Good Omens), These boys have been pining so long they’re practically trees, Third Alternative Rendezvous
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-29
Updated: 2019-08-29
Packaged: 2020-09-28 20:42:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,350
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20432144
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladyeternal/pseuds/ladyeternal
Summary: The apocalypse is nigh.  Tensions on all sides are reaching a fever pitch, and Aziraphale has never kept a secret from Crowley before... or at least, never one that he’s found the keeping of so hard.When tempers flare at the Third Alternative Rendezvous, both angel and demon find themselves confronted with truths that rock their already-crumbling foundations.  Will they give up on a relationship that has defied the odds from humanity’s very infancy?  Or will they finally realize that the only way to change the course of Destiny is to forge a new path for it to walk?





	Just You and Me Within These Walls

**Author's Note:**

> morganoconner & tiptoe39 both prompted me to write this during our retreat this summer. I can only hope that this is as enjoyable a read for them, and all of you other wonderful readers who give it a chance, as it was for me to write.
> 
> Please go give their works a read as well; they’re both phenomenal writers that have inspired and supported me for years!
> 
> **ETA**: You may notice that I changed the episode tag. This is because, like a moron, I forgot to check which episode the bandstand scene was in before I posted it. I’ve watched the entire 6-hour run all of a piece so many times that the demarcations between episodes get a little blurred if I don’t have access to look up specific scenes, which I didn’t at the time of initial posting.
> 
> I also changed Covent Garden to Vauxhall, because the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens was the place I actually meant and I got that mixed up, too. Sorry for any confusion, my loves! -______________-
> 
> As always, comments = ♥
> 
> Music: [Find the fanmix for this & my other fics on Spotify!](https://open.spotify.com/user/eb9xgc1zaky70qs90sdc4frz0/playlist/67Dife1vA5RoIhHB498cwS?si=oCaWN0dqSIyPhoQvyBAm7A)
> 
> Rewrite the Stars - Zendaya & Zac Efron  
Clarity - Zedd  
Ashes of Eden - Breaking Benjamin  
You and I - Queen

“Even if this one turns into a burning puddle of goo, we can go off together!”

The words rang in the air, their impact not unlike the shock that the angel had taken when he’d once picked up a downed power line to keep it from sparking near the shop. For a long moment after, all Aziraphale could do was stare at the demon who’d uttered them, his mouth parted as if about to speak despite being robbed or any words that might have been sensible in response.

Crowley… a demon… a Fallen… wanted to run away with him.

He couldn’t see the demon’s eyes; when they were alone in the shop, Crowley rarely wore his glasses, but even when they were alone together outside its walls, Crowley never took them off. It was a minor irritation normally, since the angel had been able to read even the most minute of Crowley’s micro-expressions for at least the past five centuries. But now… now he wanted almost desperately to see them. To know if the yellow pupils had taken over his eyes completely, or if some white sclera still remained visible at the edges.

But there was no help for it. Crowley’s eyes were hidden from him, and with them, whether the offer was being made simply because Crowley had grown used to Aziraphale’s company over the millennia, or if there might possibly be something more driving the offer.

“Go off together?” he echoed, a little ashamed of how weakly his voice trembled on the final word. It was an impossible idea, wasn’t it? After all, they couldn’t just abandon humanity to destruction. “Listen to yourself.”

“How long have we been friends?” Crowley asked rhetorically. “Six thousand years!”

There was such earnestness in his voice that it almost physically stung to hear, let alone the reminder of precisely what they’d been through together just by sheer volume of time and proximity. They’d always gravitated towards each other, long before they’d even known it consciously. Aziraphale knew only too well how often he’d looked for Crowley in the milling crowds of human life. How over thousands of years and uncounted miles, they’d become like binary stars, forever locked into each others’ orbits.

And those orbits had only grown closer as Aziraphale had begun to experiment with ways to get Crowley’s attention. When Crowley had proven that the Arrangement could be more than just the two of them no longer playing zero-sum games with the humans surrounding them. When Crowley had begun doing miracles just because they would make Aziraphale happy, and Aziraphale had rewritten ancient protection magicks to ensure that Crowley could enter the bookshop whenever he wished: an exception he couldn’t have imagined granting to any other demon, and one that he feared to this day Heaven would detect for what it was and decide to end Crowley once and for all.

That was what he’d always feared, if he was honest with himself. His rebellious friend, who had already lost so much to that very trait, was too reckless for his own safety. It was up to Aziraphale to protect him, just as he always had. From that first moment atop the wall in the Garden, when he’d shielded Crowley from the oncoming storm.

And if Crowley would not listen to reason, Aziraphale would have to resort to the only language the demon might understand.

“We’re not friends!” he shouted desperately. “We are an _angel_ and a _demon_. We have nothing whatsoever in common; I don’t even like you.”

He’d turned away more from the face of that lie than from Crowley, knowing before the taunting “you doooo” rolled from the demon’s throat that it had been ridiculous to even say the words. He needed to try harder; do better at convincing Crowley that, stay or go, Crowley would never be safe if Heaven realized just how close they’d become. Hell might rejoice at the temptation of an angel into a devil’s company, but Heaven would never tolerate a Fallen seducing another of their ranks into defection.

“Even if I did know where the Antichrist was, I wouldn’t tell you!” he cried, pivoting on his heels and advancing on Crowley, though he was careful to keep at least half the bandstand between them. “We’re on opposite sides!”

“We’re on _our_ ssside!” Crowley hissed back, coming a few steps closer himself.

“There is no ‘our side’, Crowley!” Aziraphale shouted, panic starting to set in. Crowley wasn’t listening, just as he hadn’t listened about the holy water. Just as he hadn’t listened about so many things over the years. Except this time, it wasn’t going to lead to a mistake that they could paper over in a report. It wasn’t going to lead to a fit of frustrated, drunken depression and then a century-long torpor that Aziraphale had to cover for him so that his superiors in Hell wouldn’t notice. Heaven and Hell were converging on their doorstep, and Crowley was going to die. “There never was! And we’ve been deluding ourselves pretending otherwise for all this time.”

One ginger eyebrow quirked on a face otherwise too stony to read. Aziraphale wished those blasted sunglasses to the bottom of the Kraken’s vent. “Right… all right, then. Have a nice doomsday.” With an about-face far more regimented than Crowley’s usual sinuous movements, the demon turned his back on the angel and made to leave.

It was all Aziraphale could do to keep his face from crumpling into tears right there on the spot. He could cry later, he told himself: after Crowley was safe and Aziraphale had done everything he could to prevent the impending war on his own.

“Just one more thing…”

Aziraphale’s head shot up to see the demon having paused just on the walk below the bandstand, turning with a glide so reptilian that Aziraphale was shocked his body still appeared human. “You swear you’re not willing to kill anyone to prevent the war… how exactly d’you plan on avoiding having to kill demons once it starts?”

“I shall do everything in my power to prevent Armageddon, Crowley; with or without your assistance.” The stiffness in his voice almost hid the way it trembled around the lump in his throat. Almost. “I’ll appeal to the Highest Authority if I have to. At the very least, She might listen to reason.”

“Listen… yeah.” Crowley fully turned back, mounting the steps into the bandstand and crowding into Aziraphale’s space again. “Problem with that is: you and I both know that listening is _all_ She does anymore. You want to talk about self-delusions, angel? If She was going to just stop it all with a Word, She’d’ve done it long before She let Satan actually spawn.”

It was an unexpected tactic, and one that struck directly at the heart of Aziraphale’s worst fears. “You can’t know that, Crowley. Just because She can’t speak to a Fallen-”

“Has She spoken to you?” Crowley cut in. “Or Michael, Her favorite warrior? Gabriel, Her Herald and Judge: has he heard from Her lately? Uriel? Metatron and Sandalphon, Her busy little scribes? Have _any_ of them heard a word from Her in more than five blasted centuries?” He was pressing, and Aziraphale wasn’t backing away, their faces so close that their noses nearly brushed. “Or are they all just working from the playbook She gave them right at the Beginning without bothering to even question why She’s smirking up Her sleeves at them while they’re about it?”

“She doesn’t smirk!” Aziraphale shouted, defensive of his Creator.

“Of course She does!” Crowley shot back. “You think I don’t remember Her face?”

A shock ran through Aziraphale at that. Pieces suddenly falling together, like a puzzle long-abandoned from frustration being completed in minutes when you came back to it.

_“That was a long time ago.”_

_“I don’t feel anything unusual.”_

The casual way in which Crowley had accepted taking on miracles for Aziraphale: so much more easily than Aziraphale with temptations. His nonchalance about the dangers of holy water. The way he never seemed to fear either Heaven or Hell’s retribution should their Arrangement be found out, as Aziraphale always did.

The minimalism which had always pervaded whatever dwelling he set up for himself when they were in one place for more than a few years. Aziraphale had never been to the flat Crowley had taken in Mayfair, but somehow, he was suddenly sure of what it looked like. But Crowley didn’t like staying at his own flat, except to sleep. Their evenings together were spent in the bookshop, where Aziraphale was most comfortable. Where they were protected from the intrusion of other Fallen, and where Heavenly forces didn’t bother to try.

In a place that Aziraphale loved, and where the love he bore it had seeped into every board and seam, pressed between yellowed pages and wedged between leather bindings. Nothing like the sterility of Heaven. Nothing like the dank decay of Hell.

“Oh.” It was all Aziraphale could say, and yet he watched through those dark lenses as Crowley’s irises blew wide when he realized how much he’d managed to give away in his fury. He wanted to remove them. To see those golden eyes in their full glory despite the dim twilight surrounding them. But he wouldn’t. He knew the demon too well. Crowley hid himself away, bits and pieces wherever he could, so that no one could ever gain his true measure. So that no one could ever hurt him as deeply as the Fall had ever again.

No one except Aziraphale, from whom he had only ever held one thing back.

“You’re losing the point, angel,” Crowley was saying when Aziraphale snapped back in. “The point is that it’s a test. All of it. One big, bloody scientific experiment to see if what She’s made will stay together or fall apart. She’s willing to test it all to destruction just to make sure it works. And they’re all too stupid to realize it because they’d rather fight than think.”

“And yet you think that the answer is to murder a young boy instead?” Aziraphale challenged. “That’s not like you at all, my dear… unless you’re testing me like you claim the Almighty does.”

“You think you know me that well, eh?” Crowley returned hotly. “Six thousand years-”

“I think it’s time we stopped pretending it hasn’t been far longer than that,” Aziraphale cut in, his own voice cooler now, more controlled. He had the shape of it now. He was no longer afraid. “That’s the part I was never able to figure out, you see: why you just appeared beside me that day in the Garden after Edom and Yeva were banished. A demon… the demon responsible for their fall from Grace and that knew I had been issued a flaming sword... and you just manifested right beside me and struck up a conversation like you knew how I would react.”

“You’ve always been softer than the others,” Crowley pointed out. “Wasn’t hard to spot that about you… even _before_ you confessed to an enemy that you’d given your sword away. Something you wouldn’t even confess to _Her_.”

His right hand reached up, lightly touching Crowley’s left wrist. Crowley looked down at the contact point between them but otherwise didn’t react. “No, that wasn’t it… you believed I’d recognize you, didn’t you? We knew each other. Before the Fall.” Crowley spat out a sound and made to move away, but Aziraphale’s hand wrapped around his wrist and held him fast, with all the stubbornness that the angel could bring to bear. “Crowley, please-”

“And what if I did?” Not bothering to fight his grip, Crowley finally pulled away his glasses with his free hand, letting Aziraphale see the way his sclera was completely hidden now, his irises so wide that they took up all of his visible eye and the slits so narrow that they were barely a pencil-line within the glowing gold. “You didn’t, and in six thousand years you’ve never cared enough to ask. Too busy learning the gavotte and making love with all of those tragic poets and cutting little snide remarks-”

“I never-!”

“You never,” Crowley sneered. Aziraphale still hadn’t let go. “What was that I caught you up to with Byron at Vauxhall, then? Certainly didn’t look like you were comparing folios.”

“I don’t think this is the time or the place to be discussing that sort of thing,” Aziraphale declared primly. He could feel the flush creep up his neck and cheeks at the memory, at how distant Crowley had seemed for years afterwards. “Best to reserve such things until after we avert the Apocalypse.”

“And how exsssactly d’you propose we do that?” Crowley demanded. “Because if you think we’re talking the Almighty into intervening, you’ve finally gone sssoft in the head, angel. It’ll never work.”

“We find the child,” Aziraphale said, sounding out an idea as it came together, newly formed, in his mind. “And then we do what we originally set out to do.”

“Y- what?” Crowley pulled his arm free of Aziraphale’s slackening grip, watching the angel start to pace. “What the bloody Hell does that mean?”

“We set out to try and balance Warlock, didn’t we?” Aziraphale asked him, thinking fast now. “And because _we_ believed Warlock Dowling to be the antichrist, neither Heaven nor Hell were paying attention to the fact that he wasn’t; they never checked, just like they’ve never done for anything else we’ve got up to over the centuries.”

“Told you so,” Crowley couldn’t resist adding.

Aziraphale threw an irritated face. “But while all of us were concentrating on Warlock and turning him into an absolutely spoiled monster of a child, the _real_ antichrist grew up with another family. A nice, normal family that was neither good nor bad. Simply people living their lives and raising their son and doing their best. In total obscurity.” His eyes were bright when they fixed on Crowley again. “In short, my dear, he grew up to naturally be what we tried to cultivate Warlock into becoming: neither good nor evil. Just a normal, average eleven-year-old boy.”

It didn’t take Crowley long to catch up. “The dog… when it found him, because it was seeking his signature and not his name… he wouldn’t have named it to make it a beast of Hell and destruction. He would’ve named it something normal. Like Spot or Rover or Terence or somewhat. He has no idea what he is… what he’s started just by existing.”

“Which means that we might be able to reason with him.” Aziraphale crossed back to the demon’s side. “We don’t have to kill him, Crowley; this is _his_ world, after all: so much more having been raised as a normal human than if he’d been raised like we did Warlock.”

A small, self-deprecating smile crossed Crowley’s lips. “You weren’t the one managing bath time and singing lullabies for all those years, angel.”

“The point is,” Aziraphale continued after a mildly exasperated sigh, “that he won’t want to destroy the world. He loves it too much. If we can get to him before the rest do, we might stand a chance of convincing him to… I don’t know… beg off it somehow.”

“You think that an eleven year old is going to be convinced to stand up to both Heaven and Hell just because he loves Tadfield?” Crowley’s lips quirked. “D’you never even consider the worst in people, angel?”

“I never said we’d find him in Tadfield,” Aziraphale hedged.

“And you’re not the only one that can finally put together clues, either.” Crowley smiled, and Aziraphale tried to ignore the way it spun radiance at the base of his spine and threatened to make his knees go weak. “You’ve worked it out somehow. The boy’s in Tadfield somewhere, and you know where… and you weren’t going to tell me because…”

“You would’ve asked me to kill him,” Aziraphale confessed. “I’ve never been able to say ‘no’ to you, Crowley… you must know that by now, any more than you’ve ever said ‘no’ to me. You’ve been making suggestions up until now, but if I told you, you’d ask… and I can’t kill an innocent boy. And before you say anything about him being the antichrist, don’t you go ignoring all the arguments you used on me eleven years ago! He’s no more evil than he is good.”

“That doesn’t make him innocent, angel,” Crowley countered, his tone gentle. “There’s not one of them been innocent since I convinced them to nibble on those apples. But all right,” he conceded in the face of Aziraphale’s pleading expression. “We’ll quibble over semantics later. So what happens if we can’t convince him?”

“Then…” Aziraphale cast about, clearly trying to come up with some kind of alternative. But there was none. If Adam refused their entreaties, it would be war or the boy’s death and then war anyway. And Aziraphale would not fight against his brother angels again. “I… I don’t know.”

Crowley stepped into Aziraphale’s space, his hands coming up to clasp the angel’s upper arms, deceptively strong despite the aura of softness his physical form always seemed to exude. “Come away with me,” Crowley asked again, their faces close enough for the breath of the words to curl against Aziraphale’s lips. “Angel, if this goes wrong, there’ll be nothing left here for either of us, and there’s been nothing for us in Heaven or Hell for longer than you even remember.”

“We can’t just abandon humanity to destruction,” Aziraphale tried to argue. His hands had come up to cup the bony angle of Crowley’s elbows, an embrace so dangerously close that he was shocked they were still avoiding detection. “They have no idea what’s happening.”

“Sooner or later, something’s going to kill them all, angel,” Crowley reasoned back. “Another asteroid strike or each other or the sun expanding and swallowing the planet whole. They’re mortal. We’re not.” Crowley held his eyes, the sclera finally starting to show at the edges. “I can’t stay and watch that happen, whether that’s tomorrow or a million years from now, so when there’s nothing for it left, I’m going… and I want you to come with me. Life’s too dull without you, angel; please.”

Those eyes were so sincere… so mesmerizing… Aziraphale had watched them through so many of Crowley’s moods over the centuries, but he could never seem to get enough of them. Perhaps it was the fact that Crowley let them be seen so infrequently anymore. Perhaps it was just that they were always so lively, flickering in the lamplight and crinkling at the edges when Crowley offered up a real smile. “Tell me your name,” Aziraphale asked. “Tell me who you were before, and I’ll say yes.”

“Tell me who the antichrist is,” Crowley countered, “and I’ll tell you anything you want to know, angel. I promise.”

“You still go too fast for me,” Aziraphale prevaricated. “If I tell you who he is first, there’s no need for the rest to happen.”

“Either you trust me or you don’t, Aziraphale.” There was a strange note of uncertainty under the ultimatum. A tiny wavering doubt, niggling at the truth of what lay between them.

“Oh, Crowley.” Aziraphale’s hands came up, gently framing Crowley’s face. “I have always trusted you… you wily old serpent.”

It was the most natural thing in the world for their lips to meet. For Crowley to pull his angel just a fraction closer, and for Aziraphale to wind his arms around his demon’s neck. For the sigh that escaped one to dissolve into the other’s mouth as they parted and came together again, finally erasing the last boundary between them.

They drifted back apart as if in a daze. A dream. Crowley’s eyes opened to see Aziraphale’s still heavy-lidded, a second slower, his cheeks flushed and lips just a touch pinker than they’d been before. Like that time in 1914 when he’d eaten a raspberry mousse, and a smear had clung to his lower lip after a bite had disappeared between them.

Crowley had wanted to lick it away. To watch the angel startle at the action and blush when he said something rakish and teasing, like ‘I doubt you need a layer of raspberry mousse to taste good’. He hadn’t, then. They’d been at a house party: Crowley had been tempting an heiress to break faith with the fiance that could’ve saved her family’s fortunes, and Aziraphale had been miracling a woman about to have a miscarriage. They’d been in public. Even in private, he’d not have dared.

Perhaps it was only natural that the impending devastation of all they’d come to cherish beyond each other was what made it easier to admit exactly how long in coming this had been between them.

He was the master of the easy quip; the sardonic aside that would break the tension. And yet all his lips could manage was the shape of the angel’s name as he bent his head again, catching Aziraphale’s mouth and stealing any possibility of reply. It struck between them like a spark, threatening to ignite the world around them as his hands slid around Aziraphale’s back and hauled him in, fingers finding the shadow joint where the wings of his celestial body anchored into his physical spine and seeking…

A gasping little cry, and then Aziraphale was devouring Crowley with a desperation he’d never applied to food, no matter how long it had been since he’d eaten or how anticipated the meal. The ferocity threw them off balance; without a wall or post to brace against, it was a barely-focused demonic miracle that created a bench along the knee wall that they could stumble back onto before they wound up in an indecent tangle of limbs on the floor.

They broke apart again as they landed. Aziraphale’s lips were plump and red, almost as if they’d been freshly bitten. It made Crowley’s fangs itch even as he felt the angel’s delicate fingers slide down along his jaw from where they’d been tangled in his hair. He remembered thinking that he’d caught a flash of disappointment in Aziraphale’s eyes when he’d cut it the year previous; had wondered at it off and on since, when they’d both sported so many styles over the millennia. Did the angel have a fascination with his hair, then, as Crowley did with the wings that he only saw but rarely on this earthly plane? What else might they learn about one another, if given half a chance?

And what about these semi-human forms would they miss, or never get the chance to discover altogether, if they had to flee to a star system so remote that no trace of humanity would ever reach it? Would they be safe even there? And for how long? Heaven and Hell’s forces would eventually run them down, and then what would they do?

Of all Shakespeare’s “gloomy ones”, Crowley had hated Romeo and Juliet the most. The insipid twits had overthought the entire problem, and the priest had to have been one of Hell’s, to come up with a scheme that involved so much risk and yet depended on two lovesick children to carry it off without assistance. Neither of the warring families would ever have been made to see sense until someone that took a stand, and in real life, any priest with an ounce of sense would’ve simply taken the two morons into sanctuary and explained the matter to their hot-headed parents.

But there would be no sanctuary for him or Aziraphale, let alone the two of them together, unless it was one they created for themselves. And they were neither of them lovesick tweenagers with no more wits between them than a flock of ducks.

“Angel…” He couldn’t stop himself from reaching up, cupping Aziraphale’s cheek with one hand. Aziraphale leaned into the touch, his eyes shuttering closed as he savored the feeling, seemed to be memorizing what it was like to have contact with Crowley’s skin.

Crowley knew the feeling all too well.

“I’ll go with you,” the angel said finally, his voice so soft that it took Crowley a moment to realize that he hadn’t imagined it. “If we can’t stop it, then we’ll go: to Alpha Centauri, or Minerva B, or wherever you wish. To the end of the universe, if that’s what it takes. Only we must at least _try_ to save them first, if we can. Please, Crowley… I can’t abandon them until we’ve exhausted every option that might turn the tide.”

The answer was there, on the end of his tongue. He wanted to say it, had waited lifetimes for the angel to even care about the answer, let alone ask the question aloud. And yet when his lips parted around them, the words refused to come, hovering in the gate of his mouth like the Bentley in a stall.

There was no other solution but to kiss the angel again, hungry and tender all at once. Except this time, he didn’t just open his mouth as the angel moved against him. In proximity like this, with Aziraphale so receptive to him, he could bypass the need for words altogether.

And so he opened his defenses as well, exposing the core of his blackened and twisted grace to the only person he’d trusted since the Fall.

_And grace it was… deformed and ruined and burnt beyond recognition, but grace, for it was power infused by the Almighty Herself, meant to do Her Will… a gift of Her Love that could never be taken away… now scorched and maimed by Her Indifference, and bent to serve a very different aspect of the Divine Plan…_

_It was all of Her Plan… all of it… all the questions… all the dissent and doubt and death and disfigurement… for as She was Light, so was She also Dark… capable of such beauty and abundance… such deprivation and destruction…_

_And oh, how he remembered… Her Face when his eyes first opened… Her Smile as he was Named… the spread of his wings beneath Her Hand and the way his voice had sounded when it melded with his siblings’ in adoration of Her…_

_Her Silence. Her refusal to even acknowledge his pleas for reason and logic to win out. For healing and compassion to be offered to the rebels… they’d selected him to speak for them, convinced that he could reason with Her… he’d convinced them that if anyone could persuade Her to relent, it would be him… believed that he could at least sway Her to allow some mercy…_

_For all that Lucifer’s Fall had been the brightest flash… the most famous amongst humans and supernatural entities alike… his had not been the first. Another had broken the trail for him… the pain nothing compared to the dismay… the betrayal of it…_

_His name was supplication: God, please heal. And in a single instant, She had turned Her face from everything She’d created him to be. Rejected him as flawed. A failed creation, unworthy of Her Love… unworthy of his siblings’ trust… he felt their love withdrawn, one by one, turning their backs on him as he dropped away…_

_ ** ` [[No.]] ` ** _

_There was no warning. No chance for him to stop it. It rushed through the space where his shields should’ve been, flooding in, a vermeil glow that he would’ve known in the deepest Pits…_

_ ` ** [[No, no no no no don’t you’ll hurt yourself you can’t help it nothing can don’tstopit’stoolate it’llonlyhurtyou…]] ** ` _

_ ` [[I don’t care…]] ` _

_And then he was there… in him and of him and all around him… bathing all the brokenburnedtatteredtornneglected places in gentleness… a healing essence so long absent that his being screamedsobbedwept at the raw relief of it… wounds torn open aeons ago finally bandaged and soothed… they would scar over, could never be undone, but the pain… the pain was ebbing shrinking slipping away…_

_ ` [[Oh, my dear…]] ` _

_A second wave… no less intense than the first, but pitched slower… tenderness… a thousand thousand thousand moments made so much more bearable by his presence… guilt that he’d never seen it, not in all this time… that he’d never detected the suffering below the sarcasm, the devastation behind the decadence, the desperate search for a sliver of lost joy disguised by wit and vivacity…_

_ ` ** [[It’s all right… it’s not your fault…]] ** ` _

_ ` [[It’s not all right… not when I…]] ` _

_Retreating… trying to hide what was already exposed… he couldn’t wouldn’t dared not allow it… not now… not when they had so little time…_

_He reachedgrabbedpulled… too hard, too much, too fast… except he came crashing back to him just as fiercely, just as fast, desperation and relief that matched his own driving them back together… to no longer feel so alone… to no longer feel so lost… each of them echoing the other until they could no longer sense where one ended and the other began… filling the empty spaces neither had known how to voice… only known that they were easier to bear when the other one was near…_

_At the heart of it all, an ineffable question._

_And finally, two voices melded to give a single answer._

When it finally receded, twilight had given way to the black velvet of night. Stars glittered in the sky, though neither of the beings in the bandstand needed them to see. They stared at one another, cradled in each other’s embrace, as the truth of what had just transpired settled over them both.

“Raphael.” Crowley’s voice felt nearly rusted closed, his old name sticking in his throat and burning like sulphur. “She called me Raphael.”

Cool balm soothed it away in an instant, leaving Aziraphale looking nearly as startled as Crowley himself. There were apparently some new instincts that they’d need to grow accustomed to… presuming they’d have anything resembling the time to devote to it with the apocalypse counting down around them.

The angel’s responding intelligence was as shaky as Crowley’s, his blue eyes still wet and his hands trembling where they gripped at Crowley’s arms. “The antichrist’s name is Adam Young.”

Crowley’s lips pulled into a smile as rueful as it was tremulous. “I’ve no idea if we’ve just made things better or worse for ourselves, angel… don’t think we’re going to manage keeping this off our Home Offices’ respective radar for long.”

“Then we’d best hurry, my dear,” Aziraphale replied, steeling himself. “I doubt even the shields around the bookshop could keep them out indefinitely, and I’ve no desire for them to catch us unawares.”

“Right.” Crowley stood after Aziraphale did, preparing for a second time to leave the bandstand, glad that they’d so assiduously shielded it from Heaven and Hell’s observation teams. He watched Aziraphale take a breath, squaring his shoulders… saw the shadows in his beloved angel’s aura that hadn’t been there before.

The foolish angel had poured his light into Crowley, and Crowley had bled some of his darkness into Aziraphale in return. What the effects would be long term, it was impossible to guess.

It was enough for Crowley to reach out and spin Aziraphale back into his arms for a fervent kiss, tasting the sweetness of his angel’s mouth one last time as Aziraphale met him just as eagerly.

“Fine time for you to decide to move too fast for me, angel,” Crowley told him. _`**[[I love you… I’ve always loved you. From the moment you were made, and She gave you into my keeping at the Eastern Gate. I will love you to the unmaking of the world and back again.]]**`_

Aziraphale smiled. “I rather thought so myself.” _`[[My demon… my archangel… my Crowley… of course I love you, too. I loved you before I even knew my own name.]]`_ “Now come along, my dear… we’ve work to be getting on with.”

Not for the first time, and hopefully not the last, Crowley let Aziraphale lead on, his lips curving with an indulgent, secretive smile.


End file.
